Katherine W. answered • 01/24/20
Doctorate and undergraduate degrees, with translating and interpreting
Hello
Psychosocial and "pure" linguistic aspects underlie what is called "critical discourse analysis." That is, on the psychosocial side, political, psychological, and social features of the communication are examined and analyzed, so as to determine how "power" is being defined and exploited through language use, for instance. The question of "dominance" as it is made evident through the use of language is examined; naturally, where there is "dominance", there is inequality, and this is described in terms of word and grammar use, too. CDA (Crit Disc Analysis) is necessarily multi-disciplinary, since social science and behavoir, psychology and language all play roles. Van Dijk suggested that CDA can be exploited by what he calls "power elites", and he suggests that any study of social inequality should exploit CDA, since it must entail an account of intricate relationships between text, talk, social cognition, power, society and culture. CDA concerns itself with questions of power and dominance; society and culture; links between "texts" and society; interpretations and explanations; and discourse as social action. I hope that this will help. Thank you.
